Tesla is a vertically integrated battery electric vehicle automaker and developer of real-world artificial intelligence software, which includes autonomous driving and humanoid robots. The company has multiple vehicles in its fleet, which include a m...
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Charlie Munger watched Elon Musk build Tesla from a company he expected to fail into what he called a "minor miracle," and he still refused to own a single share.
Munger's doubts went back to Tesla's earliest days. Musk later recalled a lunch where Munger laid out, for the whole table, every reason Tesla would fail. Musk said he agreed with all of them and expected the company would probably die, but thought it was worth trying anyway. By November 2022, Munger was telling CNBC's Becky Quick that there hadn't been a successful new auto company in a long, long time and that what Tesla had done in the car business was a minor miracle.
Respect never turned into a position. At the Daily Journal annual meeting in February 2023, Munger described Musk as very talented but peculiar and said, "I don't buy him and I don't sell him short." In his final CNBC interview, taped with Becky Quick in Los Angeles on November 14, 2023, two weeks before his death at 99, he went further. Munger said he didn't regard Musk as truly that rich because it isn't certain everything he's working on can work, warned that Musk could get beaten badly in autos, and said he would not invest in Musk's auto business himself.
Munger's core argument was about risk, not talent. He said anyone with a "perfectly ridiculous amount of money" almost always has an element of luck, and that Musk had used leverage to double down to the edge of extinction maybe two or three times. "I put Elon Musk in a too-hard pile," Munger said. "I never bet against him, but I never bet with him." His conclusion: his life worked better if he treated the world as though Musk didn't exist.
Why it matters for investors: the tension between Munger's patience-and-compounding approach at Berkshire Hathaway and Musk's concentrated, leveraged bets is sharper than ever. Tesla trades as one of the market's most debated stocks, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq in June 2026 under the ticker SPCX, and Bloomberg's Billionaires Index put Musk's net worth near $927 billion as of September 23, 2026. Munger's framework doesn't say Musk is wrong. It suggests that investors can admire an extraordinary result and still decide the risk doesn't belong in their portfolio.
Photos of Elon Musk and Charlie Munger from Shutterstock via: favoritesphoto and bella1105.
Video contains content from X users: @elonmusk, @Flandermaxx.
$TSLA. $SPCX. $BRK.B.
#CharlieMunger #ElonMusk #Tesla
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